The United States is rich in forests, yet about 39% of the softwood lumber used by Americans in 2005 came from other countries (WWPA 2006). In fact, the United States has not been ?self-sufficient? in lumber (with exports exceeding imports) for more than 40 years. According to Haynes et al. (2007), the trade deficit in lumber has grown from 4.1 billion board feet (bbf...

A critical component of assessing the impacts of climate change on forest ecosystems involves understanding associated changes in biogeochemical cycling of elements. Evidence from research on northeastern North American forests shows that direct effects of climate change will evoke changes in biogeochemical cycling by altering plant physiology forest productivity, and...

Microbial-mediated decomposition and nutrient mineralization are major drivers of forest productivity. As landscape-scale fuel reduction treatments are being implemented throughout the fire-prone western United States of America, it is important to evaluate operationally how these wildfire mitigation treatments alter belowground processes. We quantified these important...

Satellite imagery can potentially reduce the costs and time associated with ground-based forest inventories; however, for satellite imagery to provide reliable forest inventory data, it must produce consistent results from one time period to the next. The objective of this study was to temporally validate a Landsat-based volume estimation model in a four county study...

Nonnative invasive plants (IPs) are rapidly spreading into natural ecosystems (e.g., forests and grasslands). Potential threats of IP invasion into natural ecosystems include biodiversity loss, structural and environmental change, habitat degradation, and economic losses. The Upper Midwest of the United States encompasses the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan...

Understanding the impacts of clear-cutting is critical to inform sustainable forest management associated with net primary productivity and nutrient availability over the long-term. Few studies have rigorously tested model simulations against field measurements which would provide more confidence in efforts to quantify logging impacts over the long-term. The...

While much research over the past 30 years has focused on the deleterious effects of excess N on forests and associated aquatic ecosystems, recent declines in atmospheric N deposition and unexplained declines in N export from these ecosystems have raised new concerns about N oligotrophication, limitations of forest productivity, and the capacity for forests to respond...

Decades of study on climatic change and its direct and indirect effects on forest ecosystems provide important insights for forest science, management, and policy. A synthesis of recent research from the northeastern United States and eastern Canada shows that the climate of the region has become warmer and wetter over the past 100 years and that there are more extreme...